Inner Awareness of Grace—Exposing the Deficit

Pathwork Guide Lecture No. 250 | April 19, 1978

Share this...

Greetings and blessings, my very beloved friends. The joy of seeing your community develop and expand is enormous. We praise the Lord for this wonder that springs from your personal growth, from your commitment and devotion to serve a cause that goes far beyond your earth selves.

Now I wish to speak about the meaning of grace. For many of you this is a difficult concept to comprehend. In former times the concept of grace was much more acceptable, for it was understood as a special dispensation from God that was given, or not given, for His own reasons. The individual had little to do with it. At a time when self-responsibility was little developed, grace was interpreted in this manner and was therefore easier to accept.

In the present general state of humanity, self-responsibility is much more developed. You understand that you create your reality and your experiences—good or bad. How then does grace come in? Is it totally eliminated from your vision of life and reality? No, it is not. Grace is as much a reality as self-creation and self-responsibility—and they are by no means mutually exclusive. I wish to give you some perspective on this subject, which will then open up another equally important topic, that of faith.

The grace of God is. It exists at all times, penetrating all that is. It exists in the very nature of ultimate reality, which is thoroughly benign. Grace means that all must work out for the best, no matter how evil, how painful, how tragic things may appear at the moment. In the end, when people have lived through and fully assimilated the negative experiences, they come around full circle to the light of love, truth, joy, peace, pleasure supreme, eternal life, and wellbeing in all respects. This must always be the ultimate reality and therein lies grace.

So, truly, you cannot help but live in the grace of God. The very air you breathe is permeated with it. Every substance of life, on all levels—from the finest vibrations and radiations to the crudest matter—is permeated with it. The very world you live in, the universe, all of creation, the way divine law is constructed, all are an expression of divine grace. You live and move and have your being in a universe that consists of such tenderness, such love, such personal care of the living God, of the eternal presence in all that is, that it simply defies description. You are surrounded by a universe in which there is simply nothing ever to fear—no matter what the momentary appearances may be.

The problem is not that you need to draw the grace of God to you. For it is already there, filling every pore of your being. The problem is your lack of vision, your limited view, your distorted interpretations, your faulty outlook, your personal blocks. These seem like walls of iron, which enclose you and prevent you from perceiving and experiencing grace. In reality the walls are mist and must immediately dissolve once you rearrange your field of vision and thus begin to dissolve your personality defects and blocks. As always, this process begins with small everyday events. As I so often said to you, you can easily tell whether you are in truth or not by the way you feel. This gauge is always right at your disposal. If you are in harmony with life, if you are joyous and hopeful, you can be certain that you partake of God’s grace that surrounds and permeates you, that you are in truth—at least in the limited way of your present state of consciousness—regarding your immediate experiences and reactions to the world around you.

But when the opposite occurs, when you are in a state of disturbance, fear and disharmony within yourself, with others and life in general, you forget this key. I wish you would all choose to remember using it. Impregnate yourself with this truth in your daily meditations. When you are unhappy, fearful, discouraged, in darkness, know at least that you are not in truth. This will make a lot of difference. Know that your blocks, your faulty vision, have separated you from the grace of God in which you swim, even now, although you do not know it.

Your habit of putting effect before cause creates gross misconceptions and misinterpretations of life that prevent you from experiencing grace. The automatic habit of this reversed thinking extends to many different issues and aspects of reality. One example is the assumption that the experience of God’s grace is something to be given to you. Another assumption is that faith comes also from outside, as if one day something would be added on to you, while right now you lack it. You lack neither grace nor faith. As everything else, they, too, already exist in you. If only you could begin to think of yourself in these terms, all would fall into place. You have a notion of the theory, but in your habitual thinking you resist its truth. You think of yourself as an empty vessel that needs to be filled.

Becoming implies acquiring something that you do not possess already. But in reality you are already all that you could ever wish to be. You already possess the states of consciousness you aim to attain. It is simply that only a limited part of your total self functions on the level of reality into which you were born. It is your task to gradually release those parts of you that fully exist on another level of reality, but need to be brought into the material level. The lower self exists precisely because of the limitation with which you manifest on this level of reality. Expansion, growth, development—all these terms mean only one thing: to bring forth the perfection of what you already are in essence. If you could think of this process more as releasing what is already there, rather than as becoming something that you are not, that is still foreign to you, you would aid your process considerably.

So you can release your intrinsic awareness of grace. You can release the faith that is already in you, the knowledge that you live in a tender universe, shaped out of personal love and caring, that there is nothing to fear. If you visualize in this way, you will release new awareness, new knowledge, new faith, new ways of reacting that will surprise you and fill you with wonder and joy.

What are the obstacles to releasing the faith, the knowledge, the awareness already existing within you? The first obstacle is your not knowing that you possess the awareness, the faith. The knowledge must be cultivated; it has to begin in your outer brain and thinking. Just considering the possibility that there is nothing to fear, that you live in an utterly benign universe, that you are filled with the living God, will make you automatically challenge your fears, your doubts, your distrust and your negative beliefs. This, in turn, will make it much easier for you to sufficiently trust life and its laws so that you will risk giving. And this is indeed an important lever that touches an inexorable law of life. For only as you give out of yourself, from and with your heart, can you truly receive.

You have heard the law of giving and receiving discussed many times. It is such an important law that it is taught in all the religious scriptures that ever existed. Yet it is usually misunderstood, or at least slightly but sufficiently distorted, so that you put it aside. You believe it is a sanctimonious edict, issued forth by an arbitrary authority that makes demands on you and then possibly rewards you with something in return. You see it as a form of bargaining. You resist the concept because it offends human dignity. You distrust a universe that is pedagogic and treats the individual as an unruly child—though it is surely not your true personality, your real being, who believes this distortion.

What does the law of giving and receiving mean in reality? Every human being contains a built-in mechanism that makes receiving quite impossible when the soul withholds its innate capacity and yearning to give. Since in reality giving and receiving are one and the same flow and movement, one cannot exist without the other. Where distrustful, fearful holding back makes it impossible for the soul to enter into the flow of universal life and movement, the total process of giving and receiving is stopped, so that the grace of God, with all its manifestations, cannot enter into the consciousness of the personality. It is as though all the riches were there, ready to be tasted and experienced, but the hand could not reach for them; the senses cannot perceive them; the brain cannot even observe their vivid reality. It is as though the whole personality with all its perceptions were dulled, so that the total vision of life is distorted. This strengthens the illusion that you live in a poor, empty universe. It increases the belief that your inner universe is equally poor and empty, that you have nothing to give from within and nothing to receive from without.

As you know, every attitude, every mental and emotional condition creates chain reactions and circles—either benign or vicious ones, according to the truth or error of your belief, attitude, and behavior pattern. When you are in the illusion that both the outer and the inner universe are empty and impoverished, you automatically create a vicious circle. This belief must make you hoard yourself, your innate riches, talents, everything you possess spiritually or materially. You are holding in rather than giving out. Hence you separate yourself from the riches that surround and penetrate you. This inner mechanism makes your receiving impossible; it strengthens and finally seems to confirm your vision of poverty of life and self.

In contrast, the benign circle can be established by risking giving out, in the conscious expectation that abundance will grow because the fear of poverty and deprivation may be illusory. As you start giving to God in trust and with love, you release the inner faith and you liberate your clouded vision. You will not only see the abundance surrounding you and flowing through you, but you will also lift the lever that locked the mechanism. You will reach out into this rich world and allow it to bestow upon you all that it contains in overpowering abundance, given to you by the Creator with limitless love. Words can never describe this magnificence. By risking giving out you enter into a benign circle; you can afford to release more of your inner and outer riches because you know they are eternally and inexorably replaced in a never-ending stream. The more you receive the more you can give, and the more you give the more are you capable of receiving. It is then that giving and receiving become one.

So the first step must be to risk giving out. Consider that the fear that makes you hold and hoard is erroneous. Test once again a new ground rule of life and begin gradually to discard the old one that has proven detrimental because it has painted a false picture of life. False pictures are reinforced by belief, just as true pictures are. Only when they are questioned do they lose their energy. Challenging them is like pulling out poisonous weeds and planting new beautiful seedlings. When you give in faith, love and trust in God, even before you are convinced that your fear of giving out is unwarranted, you have already begun to plant your new, abundant, rich, beautiful spiritual garden. When I say spiritual, I do not mean something far away, vague and realizable only in the afterlife. I mean something tangible that must sooner or later manifest in your material life, here and now, with inner and outer riches.

And now I come to yet another obstacle to establishing the benign circle in which you flow in harmony with creation and live in divine order and in divine grace. This obstacle is very important, yet seldom recognized for what it is. It exists on all levels: on the inner, emotional, psychological, spiritual and personal levels, as well as on the outer, general, universal, and collective levels. This topic is chosen at this time not only to help you personally on your individual paths, but also to help you establish the new model of world government within your ever growing community.

This obstacle is a tendency in human nature to build on deficit, a tendency intrinsically connected with the belief in an empty, poor, ungiving universe. Let me now be more explicit. Take at first the personal, inner levels. When you build positive beliefs and life patterns on top of unconscious or semi-conscious negative beliefs, you build on deficit. When you secretly believe that you are a totally unlovable and unacceptable human being, you build on deficit. When your real and false guilts prevent you from turning yourself fully over to God, you build on deficit. When you assume the universe to be hostile to you and you protect yourself against this alleged hostility with destructive defenses—that you may or may not be conscious of, that you may rationalize and justify—you build on deficit.

Building on deficit can appear to succeed for a while. That is the trouble. What is false seems to work for a while and becomes temporarily convincing. He who builds a house on unsafe, sandy ground, may indeed erect a lovely-looking structure that holds up for a while. When it begins to crumble, the builder cannot see the connection, because he may have shut off his awareness of having chosen to build on such a weak foundation. The crumbling of the house may then be ascribed to different causes. Such rationalizations only maintain the illusory picture of life and encourage the tendency of building on deficit.

The methods I have given you to work with on your path are meant to bring your deficits to the surface of your consciousness; they prevent you from ignoring the deficits. This path is directly designed to create an inner order, painful as this may be at first, so that you can begin to build on real assets and never allow your “inner economics” to become fraudulent and unsound. The temporary pain of exposing your debts, your deficits, comes from the wrong conclusion that by doing so you are doomed to accept the “reality” of poverty. You cannot trust that your unsound managing can be changed, that you can indeed create real riches, based on a healthy policy. You are constantly running on deficit, giving out in a distorted way that has nothing to do with genuine giving. This is pretended giving, in more than one way. For example, you either project your mask self to the world, while you inwardly despair about who you believe you really are, or you give out in order to accumulate in a manipulating way what you believe you do not deserve. These types of lower-self “giving” are manifestations of building on deficit. False ways of giving may temporarily work on the surface, but as your deficits increase inwardly you cover up the impoverishment you have created in order to avoid the necessary bankruptcy. You grab outer, temporary, unsound means to coast along on pretense and cherish the illusion that you can go on indefinitely in this way.

Thus you build a mask illusion on a lower-self illusion. The mask illusion is that this way of operating can go on forever. The lower-self illusion is that the world is mean and poor. To put it differently, you believe only in the illusory wealth acquired through scheming, pretense and greed, and not in the real wealth of God’s creation. In practical terms this manifests in putting so much energy in your mask and lower self that you never dare expose your deficits and the inner bankruptcy that smolders underground. When you work with your helpers and peers and bring all your guilts, all your lower-self machinations to the fore, you stand there poor. You no longer cover up with a false veneer. You no longer try to avoid the poverty you have unwittingly created through false beliefs and by destructive means that only increase the deficit. Then the fear and resistance to declaring the bankruptcy that you had frantically covered up is finally overcome through your faith. Then you can begin to create the sound new order of your inner wealth that has waited for this moment to manifest and enrich you.

All personal crises, all breakdowns are nothing but bankruptcy exposed. Such crises can be deliberately induced under controlled circumstances when you work with your helpers or in your group. You go through the shame of showing your deficits, you finally desist building on them, and you sail through the fear and pain of believing that this is your final reality. Soon you discover the real wealth behind the frantic efforts to hide the assumed—and hence self-created—poverty by pretending a false wealth, built on deficit.

Your spiritual and emotional “finances” often manifest on the material level as well. Many people live above their means; they coast on debts; they cover one hole with another, newly created hole. Although they live in a constant climate of anxiety, they refuse to create order, because they do not believe that order and abundance can exist for them, and they are unwilling to give. Perhaps they do not want to give by paying the necessary price, which may be giving their best to their work. Thus, they cannot make a decent livelihood; they depend on others and accumulate debts. However, the inner process of your pathwork in certain cases finally reaches the outer levels of material manifestation. You have even created budget sessions for those who manifest their inner deficit on the outer level. In that way you create a new, sound order and you no longer have to run on deficit. Budget sessions, though they deal with the outer manifestation, exactly replicate the pathwork you do on the inner, psychological and spiritual levels.

My beloved friends, it is extremely important for you to see that finances, economics, collective governmental procedures, follow exactly the same patterns. They are sound when government is built on assets, not on deficit; on reserves, not on debts; on fullness, not on emptiness. For those of you who have some knowledge of the way governments—national and international—are run, it will be easy to see how the principle I speak about applies to the outer, collective levels, as much as to the inner personal ones. Whenever a country goes through severe crisis—riots, revolution, war, financial collapse—it is a result of waiting too long to establish cleanliness, order, truth voluntarily, through deliberate choices, by working things out in controlled circumstances. It is the result of not wanting to expose the deficits, so that true abundance can follow. Such governmental crisis can be likened to the breakdown of an individual who refuses to expose his or her inner poverty, pretense, and deficit.

When governments practice predominantly injustice, live on greed and power drive, when they scheme and lie to deceive the people, they always create not only a spiritual deficit, but inevitably also a material one. The thus established imbalances can be covered up only for so long. Eventually they must all surface, so that a new order can be established. When countries go through such crises, changes are often brought about with the best intentions at first. New laws and modalities are created, new collective measures and forms of governments. But when the inner meaning gets lost again, the same deficit will arise through different means. The forces of darkness can again distort the truth and tempt people away from the inner truth of God. Again their vision will be blurred, so that new deficits will accumulate. Thus the solution never lies only in the form of government you adopt or the outer measures you institute, although admittedly some measures are better than others at different times.

If you take a very close and well-informed look at various governments, you will soon see where and how their deficits are created. Sometimes the direct, material deficits are obvious in a particular country’s economics. It is clear that the government avoids temporary exposure by frantically pretending, coasting along, trying to cover one hole after another, never daring to trust that real wealth can be reestablished. In such a situation it is too frightening to admit the imbalance and mismanagement. When sufficient faith is lacking, the false world picture of a poor, untrustworthy, empty universe makes this step toward honesty impossible.

Taking this step is possible only through God, with total faith, by going to and with God. Risking to have faith can create faith and also the experience that having faith is justified. It is therefore foolish to assume that a balanced, harmonious, abundant world order in which justice and peace exists can be established without a direct communication with the divine world and the Christ within and around you. If you ignore His existence, you cannot perceive His presence, nor can you hear His guidance, advice and loving inspiration. Thus you cannot summon up the courage you need to go through the temporary exposure of inner bankruptcy, which is often also outer bankruptcy, both in individuals and in countries. The shambles can be collected and the structure rebuilt in a better way only when all participants are seriously filled with the purest of motives and directly ask God’s eternal presence to help and inspire them. This is the hope of the world in which you live. Everything that is undertaken without God, no matter how intelligent and efficient it may seem at first, is bound to fail in the long run. Only through and with God can you have the courage and honesty to trust total openness. Rebuilding can then begin in earnest and in glory. Only then will all governments run on assets. Only then can they function healthily with a constant balanced flow of giving and receiving, never exhausting the reserves because all is based on truth, justice, and fairness.

No country will then deny the other its resources; mutual pressure and power plays will not corrupt the world that was created by God so that all can partake of everything, no matter where it originates. Why do you think God has distributed resources so that some are in certain parts of the world only, and others in other parts? The wisdom of the Creator disposes according to deepest reasons and meanings. Never is anything just an accident. The reason for the distribution of the world’s resources is to help people to share and to consider all other people. This will enable them also to freely receive what they need and what others have. Right here you can see how a spiritual law works on the most practical levels. Giving and receiving can exist when countries share their resources, rather than hoarding them and using them to gain more power and riches, regardless of how many people will be deprived.

My beloved friends, these are the principles that you need to establish in your community. In that way you will become a true model. Let me now say a few words about this process and give you some guidelines. The details you need to work out yourselves. You need to make yourselves channels for God’s will in every detail. But some outer guidelines are also necessary. I was recently asked a question that deals with this topic. You have become aware of a certain imbalance within your structure. Balances constantly change when one side outweighs the other. In the development of an individual, as well as that of a collective organism, balances need to be constantly reexamined and adjusted in order to establish inner and outer harmony, health and honestly acquired wealth—that is, divine abundance.

Here are some specific guidelines:

You need to examine when the individual needs to give more to the collective entity, and when the process can be reversed and the collective entity can give more to the individual.

You must never live above your means. Function out of fullness and do not run on deficit. This should not be done in a spirit of anxiety and lack of trust. It is possible to have faith and yet not use misapplied faith to justify the current tendency of your world to function on deficit. At the same time you need to establish priorities in a deep way. There may be temporary situations when a deficit on the material level may be unavoidable until a sound basis of fullness and functioning on assets is established.

If you keep this goal in mind you will attain it. It may be necessary to keep your budget smaller than you may wish; it may mean that you, as a community, may have to do temporarily without something you may like to think of as essential, until you can truly afford it. You may have to reconsider what is and what is not essential and look at it from the point of view of the work that is being done and with a view of the task that is being fulfilled on a larger scale.

Temporarily, more of you may have to pitch in with your giving, as some have done from the very beginning. Without it you would not have this community as it exists today. The law fulfilled itself clearly in that none have come to deprivation from their giving; quite the contrary, more abundance has accrued for them. When more of you adopt this spirit, more abundance will be created for those who give and for the collective entity, until the latter will be sufficiently healthy on all levels, including the material one, so that it can, in turn, give more and more to the individuals in question. But do not ever forget, even when spiritual and material health and abundance are firmly rooted, that each new person who desires to commit himself or herself to stage four—or, in other terms, the third level of development, that of nurturing others—needs to go through a period of giving without much recompense. If this step is skipped, the spiritual health of the community will suffer, and that will eventually affect its material health.

A lot will change with this new outlook. You will lose that slight anxiety that keeps nagging you because you are still groping in the dark about how to establish an economy that functions on assets rather than on deficit. You must understand that this duplicates exactly the inner process of an individual on the path. However, if the concept and vision are lacking, the outer picture may not immediately or speedily manifest the inner order that already exists. Often a problem needs to be tackled from both sides. You need to deepen your inner work on the spiritual and psychological levels and purify what runs on deficit. At the same time you need to also realize a similar process in your personal financial affairs—budget sessions are an integral part of this aspect. Last but not least, the same principles need to be established for the material affairs of the collective entity. This then is true harmony. Your entire path, in all its workings, will function smoothly and richly. You will have more abundance that is well earned, honestly deserved, and can thus be guiltlessly enjoyed. The abundance will benefit many and, among other things, will also make it possible for those who need to be materially sustained at the beginning, to have scholarships until they become self-sustaining.

This lecture goes, of course, way beyond the factual advice at the end of it. You need to deeply understand a divine law and principle. You need to recognize all obstructions that prevent you from perceiving and partaking of ever-present divine grace. Then you can release the faith that is within you, that is realistic because it is an experience of what is, and not a belief in and a hope for what might be illusory wishful thinking.

My dearest ones, Christ’s embrace enfolds all of you and accompanies you in all your doings and in all your thinking. You are blessed.

A positive concept of the universe as a benign force and benign fate for man, the freedom and fearlessness to love, and a healthy balance between activity and passivity — all these form a comprehensive whole. . . .

The International Pathwork Foundation is an equal opportunity agency and will not allow discrimination based upon age, ethnicity, gender, national origin, disability, race, size, religion, sexual orientation, or socioeconomic background. View Full Policy